book reviews

The Resurrecting Writers Series: Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol (Repost)

image Taking the book solely at face value, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol are verses concerned with the disintegration of the marriage of Lawino, a rural African (Acoli) woman and Ocol, her western-educated husband. However, peeling back the cover of the words even a tiny bit reveals a woman committed to her indigenous culture versus a man who thinks that her culture needs to be removed from the face of the earth. How could two such people co-exist in the same household? How could two such differing ideologies co-exist on the same planet? According to Ocol, not at all. His song is full of imagery that calls death upon the culture Lawino praises in her song.

We will smash

The taboos

One by one,

Explode the basis

Of every superstition,

We will uproot

Every sacred tree

And demolish every ancestral

shrine.

In Ocol’s song, the thing that is so striking about this book – the use of indigenous Acoli symbols to present a woman solidly rooted in her culture – gets turned on its head. Every thing African becomes associated with death, decay and other imagery meant be extremely negative. However, that is not the case with Lawino. Unlike she does not hate foreign customs. They are simply not hers.

I do not understand

The ways of foreigners

But I do not despise their

Customs.

Of course if things were as simple as that, there would be no need for Lawino to sing her song. For instance, I agree with Ocol’s installing of an electric stove in their house. . Lawino doesn’t know how to use it and is, in fact, scared of it.

I am terribly afraid

Of the electric stove,

And I do not like using it

Because you stand up

When you cook.

Who ever cooked standing up?

And the stove

Has many eyes

I do not know

Which eye to prick

So that the stove

May vomit fire

And I cannot tell

Which eye to prick

So that fire is vomited

In one and not in another plate.

Instead of patiently teaching Lawino the benefits of the stove and how to properly use it, Ocol rails against her. He considers her lack of knowledge one more African deficiency he wants to divorce himself from. His attitude is revealing especially because he later becomes a leader of his country’s independence struggle for Uhuru (freedom). As Lawino tells it, Ocol says

White men must return

To their own homes,

Because they have brought

Slave conditions in the country.

He says

White people tell lies

That they are good

At telling lies

Like men wooing women

Ocol says

They reject the famine relief

Granaries

And the forced-labour system.

After revealing this, Lawino goes on to question an Uhuru where her husband can’t even get along with his brother.

When my husband

Opens a quarrel

With his brother

I am frightened!

You would think

They have not slept

In the same womb,

You would think

They have not shared

The same breasts!

And they say

When the two were boys

Looking after the goats

They were as close to each other

As the eye and the nose,

They were like twins

And they shared everything

Even a single white ant.

Even more astute however, is her statement describing the period of “independence”.

Independence falls like a bull

Buffalo

And the hunters

Rush to it with drawn knives,

Sharp shining knives

For carving the carcass.

And if your chest

Is small, bony and weak

They push you off,

And if your knife is blunt

You get the dung on your

Elbow,

You come home empty-handed

And the dogs bark at you!

In raising questions that center around the concept of post-colonial independence and how such an entity impacts on the consciousness of Africans who have been educated outside of africa as well as rural Africans who have never left the continent, the Song of Lawino & the Song of Ocol ranks up there with Ama Ata Aidoo’s Sister Killjoy. Both Sissie and Lawino were asking the same questions. The current state of the continent provides the answer.

Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres – as I frequently approach history through literature. So it was with excitement that I opened Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I knew next to nothing about the backdrop to the novel, the Biafra war. I definitely didn’t know that it was Igbo-based. However, understanding my lack of knowledge, I took what Ama Ata Aidoo wrote in Our Sister Killjoy to be true; that Nigeria "not only has all the characteristics which nearly every African country has but also possesses these characteristics in bolder outline".

I have to admit I was a bit thrown for a loop when the Biafran characters would talk about Nigeria and Nigerians as The Other. Then I remembered a discussion I had with someone about Watch for Me on the Mountain by Forrest Carter. In that book, a fictional rendering of Geronimo’s life, Mexicans were consistently referred to in the negative. I didn’t get that either until I was made to understand that Mexico, as a country, was imposed on Indigenous people from without. Once I understood that, the negative perception of Mexico made a whole lot of sense. It was the same with Nigerian and Nigerians. I have to admit, though, to a little discomfort in understanding (and potentially agreeing with) the Biafran struggle for Independence from Nigeria. After all, one of the giants of African Independence, Kwame Nkrumah, believed strongly in a United States of Africa. Half of a Yellow sun raised questions such as should such a structure be based on the 1885 carving up of Africa?

Originally, I had planned to write an intricate review. However, I must admit, that reading the book soon became a chore. It wasn’t due to book being well over 500 pages. Even though the story was very interesting, the writing itself was unable to hold my interest for a sustained amount of time. Considering all the publicity Adichie has received, I expected a literary masterpiece.Now, don’t get me wrong. It is definitely worth reading; especially for folks like me who look at literature as more than just a good story. It just dragged at several points during the read.

The Resurrecting Writers Series – Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

 

Roaming the blogosphere as I am wont to do, I came across a challenge on calyx press’ blog. Of course, at 43, I do not qualify as a “young feminist” (if I ever did) but still it set me to thinking about my intentions to write a review of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.

To a young woman unanchored, on the verge of being culturally divorced from self, the anthology was one of a series of buoys clung to and devoured like I was a member of the Donner party – not the daughter of Salma. Comprising both poetry and prose, the book represents discussions black women were having with other black women – and society in general – about what it means to be a black woman. The scope of the conversation is wide-ranging. It includes the Combahee River Collective Statement which includes articulations such as

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

I’m not entirely clear on the concept of identity politics. However, it does strike me as the essence of self-determination to push your own cause. In the case of black women, the cause should be black women. Home Girls is one of the spots along my literary reading history where I realized it was acceptable, revolutionary even, to come out from the background, open my mouth and express my full self.

Home Girls is also where I first encountered the work of poet Kate Rushin. Her poem, the Black Back-ups,

is dedicated to Merry Clayton, Cissy Houston, Vonetta Washington, Dawn, Carrietta McClellen, Rosie Farmer, Marsha Jenkins and Carolyn Williams. This is for all of the Black women who sang back-up for Elvis Presley, John Denver, James Taylor, Lou Reed, Etc, Etc, Etc.

…

This is for Hattie McDaniels, Butterfly McQueen, Ethel Waters
Saphire
Saphronia
Ruby Begonia
Aunt Jemima
Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box
Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box?
AuntJemimaonthepancakebox?
auntjemimaonthepancakebox?
Ainchamamaonthepancakebox?
Aint chure Mama on the pancake box?

Mama Mama
Get offa that damn box
And come home to me

And my Mama leaps offa that box
She swoops down in her nurse’s cape
Which she wears on Sunday
And on Wednesday night prayer meeting
And she wipes my forehead
And she fans my face for me
And she makes me a cup o’ tea
And it don’t do a thing for my real pain
Except she is my Mama
Mama Mommy Mommy Mammy Mammy
Mam-mee Mam-mee
I’d Walk a mill-yon miles
For one o’ your smiles

This is for the Black Back-ups
This is for my mama and your mama
My grandma and your grandma
This is for the thousand thousand Black Back-ups

And the colored girls say*

After reading this poem, I couldn’t hear Lou Reed’s Walk on the Side as just a song. Instead, it now expressed a relationship where the talent and artistic skill of black women is used to enrich other artists – musically as well as economically. It’s Big Mama Thornton and Elvis played out all over the cultural landscape. Or would be – except that Big Mama’s daughter wants her mother and wrote a poem about it; a poem which changes the dynamic landscape of understanding.

 

 

* © 1983 Donna Kate Rushin

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez – a Book Review

I was all set to give Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez a half nod when I remembered a survey type of conversation I participated in a few years back. The questions we [a bunch of writers loosely connected through an online writing board] were asked was this: if we lived as slaves in America, what type of slave would we be: the house negro or the Harriet Tubman/Nat Turner type. Most of the responses centered on being Black Moses and Turner.  The pollster said that she herself wasn’t sure. Her response made me think especially because I was one of those cleaving to the Tubman dynamic. All enslaved Africans didn’t adhere to flight/fight mode. What of those who bore the genocidal nature of chattel slavery silently? What of those whose names we don’t know because the only worthy thing they did was to survive? With this book, Wench, we find the story of four such characters – Lizzie, Rennie, Sweet and Mawu – some of whom possess the inclination to flee. The four women are brought together over a series of summers in the decade or so before the Civil War when their “owners” vacation at Tawawa House in Tawawa Springs, Ohio – a free state. [A brief history note – due to the continual presence of slaveholders and their slaves, the hotel started losing money. The hotel, the land and surrounding acreage was sold and very shortly thereafter became Wilberforce University, now the oldest African-American private university in the US]

The series of events that the four slave mistresses (and their male companions – both enslaved and free) experience during the course of a series of summers testifies to the will to survive – a will with a contrary existence in a society which thrived off negation of that selfsame will. My change of heart (from that initial half nod to one more affirming) came as I delved deeper into the book. Of particular interest was the main character, Lizzie [named Eliza but renamed Lizzie by her owner’s wife after he moved her into the big house].  She commits actions that a surface reading of would have one labeling her as a collaborator in her own oppression – not to say anything of the harm her actions inflict on other characters. However, as I read further, I realized that life under slavery wasn’t so black and white (no pun intended). It is quite effective the way in which Perkins-Valdez leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the nature of slavery to the point of saying maybe – maybe I would have been like Eliza – concerned most of all about my children – wondering what the “Master” would do to them if I broke and run. Maybe, falling into human puppy love with the person convinced he owns you and having sex with him was considered a workable exchange for learning to read – and subsequently reading stolen newspapers to those who share your bondage. Maybe. Just maybe. That maybe moves slightly in direction of potentiality when I read in the author’s note following the end of the novel that “it is believed that the children of the unions between the slave women and the slaveholders were among the early students at [Wilberforce]”.